Red Pilling the Right Hemisphere

Have you ever become depressed and exiled from the bonus dimensions of the cosmos?

In McGilchrist's discussion of what mental illness can tell us, there's a subsection called The World is Once More Flat, describing how in certain mental states there can be "a dimension missing, the one that gives depth" in both time and space. It's definitely happened to me, which is how I know it exists. It becomes conspicuous in its absence. 

It is also possible for our world to become stale, losing the sense of continuous novelty. I recall being overwhelmed by this feeling in high school, at which point I vowed to myself that I would never have a job that bore any resemblance to its rigid and repetitive structure. But it probably wasn't high school per se, just the mental state I was in.

McGilchrist describes one patient "who saw the future as a repetition of the past. It is already tired, generic, categorized, drained of life." "The LH world, we have seen, gets 'stuck in set.' The RH plays the decisive role in avoiding repetition." 

Difficult to know what was going on in my brain back then, partly because there was so little going on. I was just adrift in the culture, without much sense of agency. Life just happened. I went on to college not because I knew what I wanted to do, but because I had no idea.

It makes me wonder if I was just floating in the RH without any kind of LH map. I think I was pretty much overwhelmed and mystified by the world, but trying to pretend I wasn't by just doing the things other adultolescents do. 

The mystification part wasn't bad, or rather, it cut both ways. At least it was never boring or predictable, which occurs if the LH is inhibiting the RH too much. Maybe I was just swimming in the RH creek without an LH paddle. So hard to know.

As alluded to above, I was just adrift in the culture, but this was before the culture had become as sick as it is today. In today's world, I don't know that I would have survived. We hear about the epidemic of mental illness in teens, but perhaps it's because the number of vulnerable individuals hasn't changed, rather, they're just immersed in a culture that makes it so much more difficult to cope. 

McGilchrist touches on this on p. 363, and I'm sure he'll have more to say later. He talks about the baleful effects of social media, which seems to put people in a perpetual LH loop, for example, constantly taking pictures of things instead of simply experiencing the things. 

He cites one patient who got a bit carried away, and began taking photographs every 30 seconds. He now has more than a million, but the LH can never recreate the living flow from which they were abstracted:

Freezing kills time. Our age is one of re-presentation.... But research shows that photographs actually erode memories. The effect of taking photos is that they substitute for memories.... the photos tend to crowd out memory of all else. And time is sliced.

Again, perhaps people at the extreme can tell us something about this hemispheric shift. He cites a certain savant who attended a Shakespeare play and calculated that the actors had uttered 12,445 words and taken 5,202 dance steps. 

He wasn't wrong. But it reminds me of a "reverse-Polanyi," so to speak, in which what is supposed to be tacit becomes explicit. Meaning is always discovered in the other direction, via implicit awareness of the particulars in order to be focally aware of what they are pointing to. And getting back to what was said in paragraph one, I have definitely experienced moods in which this focal awareness collapses and the world flattens. 

I was about to say that it's like becoming a lower animal, but it can't be like that, because animals must be immersed in a world of constant instinctual meaning. Humans can lose this spontaneous meaning, but how? Later on he speculates that this doesn't happen to animals because

both hemispheres still maintain their groundedness in the pre-conceptual world. Because of the "virtuality" that has necessarily followed the LH's primary preoccupation with the world of symbols..., we are particularly vulnerable to anything that impairs the RH, since it is our mainstay in reality.

Which is precisely the problem in our disordered culture: "The LH's world is now an increasingly virtual world. It no longer even pretends to yield a faithful portrait of reality. For that it depends on the RH":

When you are out of touch with reality you will easily embrace a delusion, and equally put in doubt the most basic elements of existence. If this reminds you of the mindset of the present day materialist science and the socio-political debate, we should not be particularly surprised. 

It's not so much that people are living off the grid, but rather, experiencing a pseudo-existence in the LH grid, precisely. 

Like the matrix, only literally: the LH becomes

self-referential, internally validating, and self-confirmatory. The serious problem for humanity is that the LH is prone to see the world this way and to "go it alone." Not knowing what it doesn't know, it tends to be overconfident it is right.

So I guess the question is, RH pill or LH pill?